When I was a kid, you'd see people who lived with paralysis or muscle-weakness as a result of contracting polio. The vaccine was first introduced in the UK in the mid-fifties and by the time I was born, at the end of 1964, we were all getting it on sugar cubes. So when I asked my mom what was wrong with that man's legs, she could explain and be reassuring that such a thing couldn't happen to me and my siblings.
I did get measles, though, and mumps. Both were very unpleasant, but, for me, not disabling. And by the time my kids were born there were vaccines for these and much else. The most serious thing I remember them having was chicken pox.
This is what I thought progress looked like. I didn't get polio, my kids didn't get measles. But now that certainty seems to be fading.
What I like about Wordland
I think the most striking thing for me is that it's a tool for writing on the internet, but it makes few assumptions about how you're going to write or how you will structure your writing.
When blogging software was finding its feet, I think many people accepted too quickly the idea that it was a form of citizen journalism. It's great for citizen journalism, some of my best blogging friends are citizen journalists. but that's not the only thing that a blog can be. And so the editing tools and the kinds of metadata they encourage seem to have focused on supporting people who were writing "articles" assuming that an article would look a lot like the kind of thing you saw in newspapers and magazines.
I wasn't that interested in being a journalist or particularly bothered about how the whole thing looked. I just wanted to write stuff on the web, be able to point other people to it and be able to find it again some time later when I'd forgotten what I'd said.
It's similar to the thing that's happened to podcasting, which converged to the mean – to interviews and thought pieces and (again, that word) journalism – that is, to formats that already existed in talk-radio.
And to me, twitter was just a place to play with what you could do in 140 characters – of course you couldn't do anything serious with that constraint. Yes I got frustrated by that format, and seduced into thinking that it ought to be serious or that it could replace my other writing, but I was more irritated by the way that following people became an industry in itself and how people would then tell me I was doing it wrong (if I wanted the results that they wanted but hadn't bothered wondering whether I wanted them too).
Anyway.
The WordPress writing interface is full of stuff that's supposed to be useful, but is actually distracting to me. It may be useful if you want certain results, but if the results you want are to write stuff on the web so that other people can see it and you can link to it from anywhere else, then I can do without categories and themes and fancy block-types and automatic sharing on social and stats and search engine optimization (if that is still even a thing) and focus on what I want to say and how to say it.
I should say what this Wordland thing is that I'm talking about. It's a very simple browser-based editor that can post to any wordpress.com site or "self-hosted sites that have the Jetpack plugin installed with the JSON API module setting true (the default)." You log in with your WordPress credentials and start writing. The way I've used it so far is to start with some notes in a daily post, which I publish when I feel OK about it and update if and when I need to. But you can just write a piece with (or without) a title or however you want to do it.
From the first few days of using it, the only enhancements that I'd like to have are ways of making easier things that I like to be able to do:
- to be able to add a podcast (audio file) to a post with the same ease as adding a picture. Something that asks me for a file, puts it in the media library and gives me back a link that will show up as a player on my site.
-
a way of adding anchors to certain parts of the post. I've done this manually today with the heading of the previous section, but I'd like a button that just inserts the code for "this is a part of the post that I want to be able to point to"
I can continue to do these things manually with no worry. And given what I said in the previous section about feature-creep assuming that all users want the same thing, if they're just me being weird and others don't need them, then I can live without them.
Perfect Path 